Jon Hart, the plaintiff, claims Comcast Corporation committed a breach of contract by violating Covenant of Good Faith and Fair Dealing, the Business and Professions Code section 17200 and 17500 and the Consumer Legal Remedies Act by practicing the management of P2P-based traffic including throttling bandwidth and "transmitting unauthorized hidden messages to the computers of customers who utilize such applications."

The class-action includes "all persons in California who purchased the Service [Comcast broadband Internet] between November 13, 2003 and the present and used or attempted to use peer-to-peer or online file sharing applications and/or Lotus Notes."

The plaintiff represents all persons who have used P2P and file sharing applications, but there is no mention of exceptions where copyright infringement/piracy is involved.

Hart's submission seeks contract damages for compensation of the impeded service, but does not specify an amount.

Recently, many other ISPs such as Canadian-based Bell Sympatico confessed to using traffic management to restrict access to accounts based on the type of application or protocols they are using. However, Comcast is still the first company to get hit with a lawsuit for such practices.

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I will respond to you as well. Every ISP that operates in the U.S. has the right to throttle, manipulate, and reorder traffic on specified network. Just because your provider is doing so, does not mean they do not have the right. Please find and read your terms and agreements. Its kinda like a contract of what services the provider is required to offer. Since it is a contract, whether you read it or not, it still applied. Here is snippet from Comcast's terms and agreements.

You shall ensure that your use of the Service does not restrict, inhibit, interfere with, or degrade any other user's use of the Service, nor represent (in the sole judgment of Comcast) an overly large burden on the network. In addition, you shall ensure that your use of the Service does not restrict, inhibit, interfere with, disrupt, degrade, or impede Comcast's ability to deliver and provide the Service and monitor the Service, backbone, network nodes, and/or other network services.

Note: Comcast reserves the right to immediately terminate the Service and the Subscriber Agreement if you engage in any of the prohibited activities listed in this AUP or if you use the Comcast Equipment or Service in a way which is contrary to any Comcast policies or any of Comcast's suppliers' policies. You must strictly adhere to any policy set forth by another service provider accessed through the Service.

4. CHANGES TO SERVICESSubject to applicable law, we have the right to change our Services, Comcast Equipment and rates or charges, at any time with or without notice. We also may rearrange, delete, add to or otherwise change programming or features or offerings contained in the Services, including but not limited to, content, functionality, hours of availability, customer equipment requirements, speed and upstream and downstream rate limitations. If we do give you notice, it may be provided on your monthly bill, as a bill insert, in a newspaper or other communication permitted under applicable law. If you find a change in the Service(s) unacceptable, you have the right to cancel your Service(s). However, if you continue to receive Service(s) after the change, this will constitute your acceptance of the change. Please take the time to read any notices of changes to the Service(s). We are not liable for failure to deliver any programming, services, features or offerings except as provided in Section 11e.

Bandwidth, Data Storage and Other limitations Use of the Comcast network infrastructure in a manner that (i) exceeds the then current bandwidth, data storage or other limitations on the Comcast High-Speed Internet service or (ii) puts an excessive burden on the limitations of the network. Examples include: Using the Comcast network to run a Web-hosting server or any other commercial enterprise.

The end argument is this: If you do not like the terms, then do not get Internet service from Comcast or any other provider. An alternate is to actually PAY for the service which you think is deserved. It is called a BUSINESS Class service contract. However, you will pay more than 40 buck for it.

I was downloading legitimate music from Microsoft Zune over Comcast and all of the sudden my song downloads slowed to a crawl. And this happened at 2am during a weekday, so I know it wasn’t the Zune servers being oversaturated. This really pissed me off so I called Comcast to complain and of course the idiot tech on the phone denied any kind of throttling. I felt like I was complaining to a brick wall so I'm glad someone is starting a class action lawsuit in hopes to get result. Maybe I'll jump in on it...

Customers are paying for a bandwidth based account! That throttling invalidates the primary advertised term of the service and no fine print changes this.

The bottom line is this:If comcast takes money from a customer for their bandwidth advertised service, they are out of their right to actively prevent the customer from having the bandwidth paid for. Yes a customer can go elsewhere for internet service but they get what they paid for during the period they're with Comcast.

Let come cast stop advertising the bandwidth numbers they do if they can't maintain good service at those rates or near enough to be acceptible. THEY are the ones who chose to make a claim and then chose to invalidate it selectively.

Business class service involves programming of the cable modem for a different rate, NOT whether you get your traffic throttled or delayed because of their filtering when you pay more for this account. You are just wrong on most counts.

You are incorrect in your basic premise. What Comcast is selling you is not a cetain amount of bandwidth for an unlimited amount of data. They are saying that they will provide up to that amount of bandwidth for an unlimited amount of TIME . Furthermore, all of their consumer contracts are "best efforts" contacts which state that they will try to give you that much bandwidth but are not obligated to do so. If you want to actually have that much bandwidth guaranteed, you have to go to a business class account which will cost far more since you are actually paying for that full bandwidth all the time regardless of whether you use it.

You just made my point when you wrote "they will try to give you that much bandwidth but are not obligated to do so." They are trying to NOT give you that bandwidth for select uses, taking deliberate measures before the bandwidth is used up. For example if you were streaming video instead of P2P, you would suddenly find it came through faster it is not a "try" to provide enough bandwidth issue.

I will agree that is one issue where Comcast may have broken the law. MAY HAVE. Comcast does not have sabotage a protocol to throttle or manupulate traffic. The TCP/IP stack was designed with retry capability. As such, many traffic shaping devices use the inherent retry functions of the TCP stack to cause packets either to be held, reset, or dropped. This type of activity is not sabotage but normal networkk capability.

My ISP does not have this in their contract, I have 100/10 MBit/s and when I FTP linux distros, DC++ or bittorrent, I get about 90+ MBit/s any time of day. I assume all my neighbours do so too. I've never had any lower speeds as long as the feeds at the other end can handle it.

Now, should they limit traffic, they would not give me what they sell. If your ISP says they can limit traffic in the contract, you've signed it. Cancel it and get another ISP. But if they never stated it in their contract with you, sue them. You're paying for a product you're not getting. Even if it's cause you share bandwidth with your neighbours. That's not your problem, it's theirs to fulfill the contract with you!

The point here is that they're selling you a hybrid, but you're only really getting 10 mpg. Offering a 12 MBps line is supposed to mean that you're getting a 12 MBps line, and you're not with comcast. That's the point. Not whether or not they have the right to change their traffic, but that they're telling you essentially that you have unlimited access, when they base their predictions on a 'typical home user" focus group that doesn't do shit online, yet they still essentially advertise it the same way.

People are already paying for the service, and they were mislead into believing they would be allowed essentially unlimited use.

"A politician stumbles over himself... Then they pick it out. They edit it. He runs the clip, and then he makes a funny face, and the whole audience has a Pavlovian response." -- Joe Scarborough on John Stewart over Jim Cramer